


you don't know how lucky you are

by saturdaynightapocalypse



Series: blink and you'll miss it [1]
Category: Bob's Burgers (Cartoon)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-23 20:38:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7479144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saturdaynightapocalypse/pseuds/saturdaynightapocalypse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>it took tina belcher until she was twenty-eight years old to find a romance that stuck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. he would never love her as much as she loved him.

She was thirteen the first time she kissed Jimmy Jr., and she always thought things would change after that.

 

She was 15 by the time she realized that nothing ever would. No matter how many times she walked with him to school or she reached for his hand during a slow dance or told him how she felt, he was never going to care for her the same way that she cared for him. And that was fine—for her, 3000 fantasy hours was enough of a relationship with Jimmy Jr. to curb her appetite. That way, she could pretend that this meant nothing to her. That kisses under the bleachers were enough, that only holding her hand when his other options had been exhausted was enough. In her dreams, they went ice-skating and down to the beach on warm days and out for hot chocolate on the cold ones. And he always held her hand.

Coincidentally, the same night she realized that they would never change, Tina and Jimmy Jr. lost their virginities.

 **jimmy:** my dad is out tonite  
**jimmy:** r u free?  
**tina:** uh.  
**tina:** yeah. im free.

That was all it had taken for Tina to go over there, telling her parents that Jimmy was helping her with her math homework and instead spending the time in his bedroom. It was awkward, to say the least. There they were, kneeling on his bed (adorned with spaceship bedsheets, no less) and she was taking off her shirt but he wasn't taking off his yet. Instead, his hands hungrily reached for her, fumbling with the clasp on her bra and she let him for a moment, her breath catching somewhere behind her sternum. She paused for a moment before she reached her hands behind her and gently undid the clasp herself, sliding off her bra and immediately pressing herself against him, as if she changed her mind and didn't want him to see her so exposed after all. She pressed her lips against his, both of them kneeling on his bed, and she tugged at his shirt, and he let her, though it was not an easy feat.

He pushed her down on the bed and she was suddenly very aware of her glasses getting in the way of them kissing, but Jimmy Jr. didn't seem to notice as he tugged at the rest of her clothes. She carefully took off her glasses and placed them aside while Jimmy Jr. unzipped his pants.

It was over before she could really understand it had happened, and she couldn't remember if he had worn a condom or not. She made a mental note to go to the drugstore the next morning, just in case. She wondered if she had to take her mom with her, but she knew that she did not want to to tell her parents about what had just happened, that she didn't want to have this conversation with them yet. One day, she will tell her mother about this night, and she'll tell her mother the honest truth about how it had made her feel. For the moment, Tina was trying to decide if she was happy or if she was sad, trying to decide if she wanted to cry or she just wanted to leave or somewhere in between. Maybe both.

Instead, she just lay there in bed with Jimmy Jr., the sheets pulled up to cover her chest. He turned to look at her and she looked back at him, brushing her dark bangs out of her eyes. She's been growing them out—she overheard him saying once that he liked girls with long hair, and since then, she's been growing out the little pageboy haircut she had sported for so long. When her mother asked her why, Tina just shrugged. She didn't really have a good reason as to why she wanted to grow her hair out. By this point, it was past her shoulders, though she hadn't quite gotten the courage to get rid of the bangs that had served as a sort of security blanket. Besides, she didn't know if her forehead looked weird, and she didn't think she wanted to find out. So, she'd go back and forth, saying that she was going to grow them out, letting them get to the point where she had to keep sweeping them out of her eyes, and then she'd just cut them herself carefully in the mirror with a pair of scissors from the kitchen.

"Did you like it?"

These were the first words from Tina's lips as she lay there, looking at Jimmy Jr. and thinking that maybe she shouldn't have done this, maybe she should have told him no, maybe she should have just told him she was busy working that night rather than coming over here with a backpack full of meaningless books and pretending that this was good for her. She shook her head slightly, blowing her bangs out of her eyes again.

"You look weird without your glasses."

These were the first words from Jimmy Jr.'s lips and something about them struck Tina the wrong way. She's about ready to start crying—she's stopped moaning by the age of 15, at least, not as much, and she felt the urge to allow that vocal tick to vibrate in her throat again. Her lips were pressed together, and she allowed herself a moment of grunting in the back of her throat, just a small dissatisfied noise in the back of her throat as she squinted to try and see him through blurry lenses that seemed to have descended over her eyes. She blinks back tears that have started to collect, and she didn't say anything else.

He must have sensed that something was wrong, because he said: "We still have another couple of hours until my dad is home. Do you want to...try again?"

Another soft moan pressed behind her lips, and she shook her head, sitting up in the bed and picking up her glasses from the side table. She wrapped the spaceship blankets around her body—she still didn't really want him to see her, and she wasn't completely sure why that was—and she picked up her clothes from the floor, putting them on carefully.

He sighed, leaning back against the pillows. "Yeah, I didn't think it was that good, either. Maybe it will be better next time."

She thought that it was just fine. Maybe it hurt a little, but it was fine. That was why she didn't say anything in return, just pulled her blue t-shirt over her head and her denim skirt back up over her hips and mumbled something about having to get home. He didn't even get up to walk her out. She just pulled her backpack over her shoulder and let herself out.

That night, the shower felt scalding hot, even though the water in their apartment was definitely lukewarm at best. She felt it run between her legs and something about that sensation burned her with a feeling that she didn't quite understand.

Her mother definitely figured out what had happened as soon as Tina got out of the shower with her hair wrapped in a towel, her pajamas draped loosely over her frame. Linda just looked at her for a moment, pursing her lips.

"Don't tell your father."

The next morning, Linda took her to the drugstore. They didn't tell anyone— _it's our little secret, me and my Teeny Tina_.

 

The second time they had sex, it was a little better. Tina's parents had been going to Gene's table-setting competition (since the first time, it had become an annual affair) and Louise was spending her night out with some friends. Her parents hadn't explicitly said she could go, but they hadn't said that she couldn't either, so Tina was pretty useless when it came to stopping her. Besides, if Tina had been a handful in middle school, Louise was a goddamned nightmare.

 **tina:** my parents r out  
**tina:** come over  
**jimmy:** k

Between the last time and this time, they had exchanged fewer words, instead kissing when no one was looking and pretending that they weren't anything when they were around other people. Tammy had been telling Tina the other night that she should really stop pining after Jimmy like this, that two years was TOO LONG, and that there were other guys who wouldn't treat her like such garbage. Tina had just sighed.

Again, it was over before it even really started, and Tina was wearing an old t-shirt and sitting in front of the sole computer in the house, now kept in her room so that she could get her homework done late into the night—and maybe scroll through Tumblr on the weekends—and she checked her email to find that one of essays was going to get published in a literary magazine. Crazy Horse, no less. She had just sent it in as a joke, hoping that they might give her a little feedback, but here was the email, sitting in her folder, telling her that her essay about living in a beach town was going to get published. Jimmy came up behind her and pressed a kiss to her neck, and she pushed him off. "Not  _now_ , Jimmy Jr.!" she scolded, reading through the email more closely. 

"What, do you want me to go?"

She paused for a long moment. "Yeah. Yeah, I want you to  _go_." 

It was the first time that she's actually taken charge in any situation between them, and he looked sort of shocked. 

"What are you waiting for?  _Go_." 

"Does this mean we're over?"

Tina paused for another long moment. "Did we ever even start?"

He didn't have anything to say to that. She pressed her lips together. "That's what I thought."

 

"Was that Jimmy Jr. I just saw leaving here?"

Louise's voice was as shrill as ever, and she was pointing an accusatory finger at Tina. 

"Uh." The moan was drawn out, the first time she had let herself do that in a long time, and immediately Tina tried to drag her shirt down closer to her knees, realizing that she was only wearing her underwear. "Uh."

"That was Jimmy Jr.! You're having  _sex_ with Jimmy Jr."

"Uh. Uh. Uh."

"Stop babbling!" A pause. "Does Mom know? Does Dad?"

"Uh."

" _Look at me, T!"_ A hand drew back and struck Tina across the face.

"Dad doesn't know! Mom knows but not about tonight!" The words were blurted out, almost too quickly to comprehend, and Tina went into her signature panic attack of huffing—huh! huh! huh!—and Louise grabbed her by the shoulders. 

"Look at me, Tina! They're not going to find out about tonight, right?" She pulled her sister closer. "About  _none_ of tonight, right?"

Tina nodded. "Right."

 

Her father found out she'd had sex when she was 17. He nearly had a meltdown. 

" _Pesto's kid?!?"_

"Dad, keep it down!"

 

At the end of the summer after graduation, they had a bonfire on the beach. No one really remembered who organized it, and there were at least 50 kids from their graduating class there. She was sitting on a rock a little farther away from the fire than she would have liked, but definitely father away from people she would much rather avoid. She had a beer in her hand, but she wasn't really drinking it—she had just taken it to get people to stop pushing drinks at her. No, she was just sitting there watching the waves crash over the posts of the pier in the distance. Before she had realized it, Jimmy Jr. was sitting next to her, and he had wrapped the blanket that had been draped over his frame around her shoulders, too. 

"Hey, Jimmy Jr."

"Hey, Tina."

The silence hung heavy between them. They hadn't spoken since that night sophomore year, and Tina had been glad for that—she had been worried that things would go sour between them, that things would change. But things never really changed, did they? Not between them. She finally took a sip from the drink in her hand. 

"You're moving to New York next year, right?" Jimmy's voice was uncertain in the darkness, and she couldn't really read his features—she blamed it on the dark, but she also knew that she was just bad at reading facial expressions. It was something Tina had learned to work around. 

"Yeah. You're going to SCC, right?" Seymour Community College was where most of the students from Huxley ended up—this beach town was the kind of place to keep people there, families sticking around for generations just because they never found the inclination to leave. Tina was different, but Tina had always been different.

"Yeah."

Silence thickened between them again. 

"I'm sorry, Tina."

She didn't even blink at his words, just taking another sip from her drink. 

"I know."

 

When they were 21, Jimmy Jr. died in a car accident driving up to New York to visit Zeke. Tina came back from New York for the funeral—there was no way that she _couldn't_ go. She wore a dress that made her look like she was Morticia Addams, with big, wide sleeves that made her feel like a bat when she flapped her arms. She drank a little bit too much and cried inappropriately through the entire service while sitting next to Jimmy Jr.'s boyfriend.


	2. tales tall as cliffs

Surprisingly, the first person Tina told about Tammy was her father. Not her siblings, not her brother, who had already proclaimed that he was "definitely gay, and not just the happy kind" at the ripe old age of 13, and not her sister, who had probably already guessed the whole thing anyway. She didn't even tell her mother, even though Linda had always been the one Tina told about these things. Linda had been the one to take care of her daughter after she and Jimmy Jr. had broken up, had been the one to pick her up and dust her off.  _Little baby_  were the words murmured.  _Teeny Tina._

But it wasn't Linda who got this privileged information, it was Bob. At completely the wrong time. 

He was slicing tomatoes by the window that looked out into the restaurant, completely focused and meticulous in his work—as usual—and Tina was beside the grill. Sixteen years old and spending all of her summer days at the restaurant with her father should have been a drag (according to all these Molly Ringwald movies she's been watching lately) but she didn't mind. While Gene and Louise were out and about—Louise was already much more popular than Tina ever would be, and Gene was always one to happily tag along on whatever stupid adventure Louise had planned that day. Tina was happy to man the grill.

This morning, she was tired. She had been out late the night before ( _Go, have fun! Don't worry about your father, you need to live a little while you're still young, Tina.)_ and she was still sort of reeling from what had happened. That's why it was easier for her to just stay silent and cook burgers before the lunch rush, nothing but the sound of her father's knife clicking against the chopping board and the burgers sizzling on the grill to keep her and her spiraling thoughts company. Tina knew that she shouldn't read too much into it—that would be the biggest mistake she could make, one that she had made with Jimmy Jr. She would  _not_ be logging 3000 fantasy hours with Tammy Larsen.

Still, she couldn't help but let her mind wander, thinking to the night before and wondering how it was that she had found herself in that position. It had only been a few weeks since she and Jimmy Jr. had broken things off—in that time, Tina had decided to focus her erotic friend fiction elsewhere. Specifically, she'd been writing about Zeke and Tammy, a healthy dose of zombies mixed in there with Tina always coming in to save the day. Odd? Maybe, but it was something to keep Tina's mind off the mess that she and Jimmy Jr. had become. That was where it had all started, she supposed. 

"How...How was last night?"

Bob's voice filtered through Tina's thoughts, and she looked up with the look of someone who had just received an electric shock. 

"Huh?"

"I was just, uh..asking how—"

"—Oh—"

"—How last night—"

"—Oh, yeah, it was —"

"—How last night was."

"It was fine. Kind of boring."

"Oh. Okay."

It was far from boring, but Tina really have the words to say what she wanted to say. Looking up at her father she paused for a moment before looking back down at the grill. She flipped the burger, pressing the metal spatula flat against it and hearing the grease sizzle on the worn-out, sputtering grill. The restaurant was empty for now, though she knew it wouldn't stay that way, and if she wanted to tell her father any part of what happened the night before, she figured that this would be the time to do it. 

"Uh, Dad."

"Huh? Yeah, Tina?"

"I kissed someone."

"Oh. It wasn't Pesto, was it?"

"No." 

"Okay."

Bob, ever the awkward parent, unsure of what else he was supposed to say, looked back down at the tomatoes he was chopping up. He inhaled sharply, wincing as he pulled his hand back from the chopping board and dropped the knife, examining the injured finger. He felt his vision start to go blurry as he saw the telltale drops of red starting to collect on his hand. 

"It was Tammy Larsen." Tina blurted the words out so it sort of came out as more of a garbled mess than anything else, the only really intelligible word in all of that was the word "son" out of Larsen. Bob, who was already feeling sort of woozy and faint, looked up. 

"What?"

"I kissed Tammy Larsen."

He paused for a moment, trying to think of how he should respond, when he promptly fainted. 

 

Tina, having recently gotten her driver's license, actually managed to take her father to the emergency room without incident, though she definitely kept side-eyeing him with a soft groan in the back of her throat. 

"Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh my God. Oh. Feeling woozy." 

Bob's voice entered Tina's thoughts, though it only went to the back of her mind behind the hum in her throat that only grew the longer they were driving. At a solid 6 miles per hour, it was going to take forever to get to the emergency room. 

"Tina. Tina. You gotta go faster. We gotta go faster."

The groan only grew louder.

"Tina. Tina, come on. The gas. Hit the gas." Bob was starting to feel the nausea growing, threatening to make the contents of his stomach travel back up through his throat (it happened to be some cereal and a shit ton of coffee, which he was sure would only make the situation worse). 

She barely heard him, unable to think about anything except for what she had admitted. She had made her father pass out, and Tina was sure that was a sign that kissing Tammy—or any girl, for that matter—was a  _terrible_ idea.

 

The night before had been a party—a real high school party, like the one that Tina and Tammy had snuck into before. This was back when they were thirteen-year-olds, in awe of the party that they had found out, through experience, really wasn't as interesting as all the movies and all the rumors had made it seem. High school parties were just a bunch of kids who had to be home early and could only have one drink before they had to drive home, or, even worse, kids who would be so desperate to get home that they would drive drunk. 

Tina, ever the rule-follower, never drank at these parties. She never drank, she never smoked, she never even thought about it. That had made her Tammy's designated driver on more than one occasion—in Tammy's car. Tina didn't have a car of her own, seeing as the family car wasn't so readily available to her, but Tammy had been gifted a red convertible on  _her_ sixteenth birthday, and Tina had definitely spent most of the warm summer days driving with the top down in that car with Tammy.

At this party, they had decided to play spin the bottle—an 80s cliche, by Tina's standards, though she definitely wasn't one to judge when it came to kissing as many people as she could. She figured that it was her job to bestow the gift of her kisses upon everyone around her. She was a  _great_ kisser and she knew it. There was no alternative to that fact. After she had broken things off with Jimmy Jr., she figured that spin the bottle would be a good way to get back into the game, but it seemed that the bottle never landed on her. In this huge circle of kids playing with the empty bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon, she always managed to get skipped over, but that didn't matter so much to her. It wasn't like her life depended on these kisses. 

By the end of the night, it was  _finally_ her turn, and she was going to be the last one, it seemed—and when her bottle landed on Tammy, Tina tried to respectfully back away. She was friends with both Tammy and Zeke, anyway, and she didn't want to get between them. 

"Oh, don't be such a boring bitch, Tina!" 

Before Tina could realize what was happening, Tammy had grabbed her face with both hands and had crushed their lips together. It wasn't a nice kiss, by any means, and Tina, wholly unprepared, could only lift her hands in the air in surprise as Tammy made a showy, drunken kiss to the whooping and hollering of boys around them who didn't quite get it into their pea-sized brains that girls could kiss each other and it was a perfectly normal thing. 

By the end of it, Tina was wiping the excess moisture from her mouth and getting dragged towards Tammy's car by the elbow, still trying to make sense of what happened. Did that even make sense? That they kissed? That Tina liked it? Her parents had never said anything  _bad_ about being—well,  _not quite straight_ , for lack of a better term—but that didn't mean that Tina had been exposed to it too much. She didn't know anything about labels other than gay, lesbian and straight, and it wasn't like she could talk to her parents about it. That was just  _too_ awkward. It was easier just to stay quiet.

Besides, on the car ride home, Tammy didn't say anything about it. If she wasn't going to say anything, then Tina wasn't going to say anything, and so they rode in silence all the way back to Tammy's house, only a couple of blocks away from the restaurant. As they parked in the driveway, Tammy looked up at all the windows, as if she was checking to see that there was no one watching, before turning back to Tina.

"Zeke and I have been having problems."

Tina paused for a moment.

"Oh. I'm sorry to hear that, Tammy." She spoke slowly and carefully with her usual strain of politeness, her voice lacking the rough, sassy edge of her counterpart. A breath passed by her lips as she waited for Tammy to either say something or to get out of the car. Tammy looked like she was struggling to say something for a moment, and when she  _did_ speak, she struggled to string the words together without slurring indistinctly. 

"I liked...kissing you."

"Oh." Tina kept her poker face, but her heart leapt into her throat. At least this time, she was ready when Tammy kissed her.

 

It hadn't taken very long at all for a doctor to see Bob—Tina supposed that the emergency room wasn't so busy at 11:30 in the morning on a Wednesday. She wasn't complaining. It only took a couple of hours for Bob to come back out, three stitches in his finger. Tina stood up, waiting for Bob to say something, and he just reached his hand out. 

"Give me the keys. I'd like to get home today."

Tina chuckled nervously at the dig, but she still felt her heart sink slightly. Why wasn't he saying anything?

As they waited a stoplight, Bob drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, the uneven rhythm of soldiers marching to battle as he waited for the light to change. Tina was curled up slightly, staring wistfully out the window. 

"You know, the first person I ever seriously dated was a boy."

Tina's head popped up, looking at Bob curiously. He seemed to lose his nerve then, faltering when he spoke again. 

"What I want to say is, uh...if you...if this thing with Tammy...it's okay. Your mother and I...we love you, okay?"

"I know, Dad."

"Good."

They spent the rest of the car ride in silence, but Tina's posture had lost some of its melancholy. When Bob could spare a glance, he could have sworn she was smiling to herself. 

 

"Tina! Tammy called!"

Linda's voice could be heard all the way out on the street, Tina was sure of it, and she didn't even say anything as she took the stairs two at a time up to the apartment, grabbing the phone and dialing the number with shaky fingers. Why was Tammy calling? Did she want to go on a date? Did she want to keep this a secret? Tina wouldn't mind so much if Tammy wanted their kiss to be a secret—she was used to plenty of that with Jimmy Jr. She had learned how to keep a good secret.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Tammy. It's me. Tina, I mean. Tina Belcher?"

"Oh my  _God_ , Tina, could you  _be_ any  _weirder?_ " Tina cringed, and she sat on the sofa, drawing her legs up to her chest. "But anyway, Tina, was last night fun? Did I embarrass myself? I don't remember  _any_ of it. Like.  _Nothing_. I was  _black out drunk_."

Tina could feel her heart sink with every word, and her eyes started to burn with tears. Before the question even arose in her mind,  _should I tell her_ , the answer was already decided. 

"It was fine. Nothing really happened." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the kudos and the kind words! I hope you guys like this chapter, and know that I _will_ be expanding the adventures of Tina Belcher past her romantic relationships in the next chapter!


End file.
